


Seventy Two Hours

by LiraelClayr007



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Childhood Memories, M/M, Meddling, Pining, Quarantined Together, Storms, accidental exposure to an alien something, but it has a fluffy ending, i spilled a little angst in my fluff, it's like a freaking forest, lots of pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:02:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23404192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiraelClayr007/pseuds/LiraelClayr007
Summary: Kirk lowers his voice, makes it almost too low to hear, and this time heispleading. “Bones. You know why I can’t stay here. You know what this’ll do to me.” He closes his eyes, then says one more time, “Please.” He can’t look when he says it. He already knows the answer.“Sorry, Jim. It’s only three days. If it’s any consolation I don’t think you were actually exposed, but we have to be sure.” He looks at Kirk, then at Spock, then shrugs. He knows what he’s putting Kirk through.Or: Kirk and Spock are accidentally exposed to something on an alien planet and have to spend seventy two hours together in an isolation chamber. Easy, right? Except Kirk is going to go mad, because he's head over heels for Spock.
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Spock
Comments: 30
Kudos: 260
Collections: Lock Down Fest





	Seventy Two Hours

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quiettewandering](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiettewandering/gifts).



> This one's for you, Sam...because you asked for it. ;)

Fifteen steps.

Turn.

Nine steps.

Turn.

Fifteen.

Nine.

“It hasn’t changed in the past hour, Jim.” Spock doesn’t open his eyes, just speaks wearily into the echoey, empty space.

He wants to glare back at the Vulcan, but he’d probably see it even with his eyes closed. Of course it hasn’t changed in the past hour. It hasn’t changed in the past sixty eight hours and–he glances at the screen on the wall–thirteen minutes. And fifty-four seconds.

But what else is he supposed to do?

He goes back to pacing the perimeter of their isolation chamber.

Spock sighs. “Jim…”

“Yes, Spock?”

But Spock doesn’t seem to have an answer. Good. Kirk doesn’t need a lecture right now. Especially when he can’t escape.

“Bones, there’s got to be another way.” Kirk is frantic, practically pleading. “Don’t tell me there are no other isolation cells on this ship–I know every inch, she’s my ship. Hell, I’ve even been held in several of the other cells before, as I know you can recall, since you’re the one who gave the orders. So what’s this about?”

McCoy is not cowed by his captain’s protests. “Look, Jim, I can’t let you out, not when there’s a chance you could infect the crew. And none of the other cells are available, so I can’t beam you to one of them, even if I thought that was advisable.” At that Kirk smiles, sure he can convince Bones to beam him somewhere, _anywhere_ –his quarters, back to the planet that got him into this mess, the vacuum of space–but the level gaze from the doctor knocks that idea flat. Bones crosses his arms over his chest and repeats, “ _If_ I thought that was advisable. Which I _don’t_.”

Kirk lowers his voice, makes it almost too low to hear, and this time he _is_ pleading. “Bones. You know why I can’t stay here. You know what this’ll do to me.” He closes his eyes, then says one more time, “Please.” He can’t look when he says it. He already knows the answer.

“Sorry, Jim. It’s only three days. If it’s any consolation I don’t think you were actually exposed, but we have to be sure.” He looks at Kirk, then at Spock, then shrugs. He knows what he’s putting Kirk through. He reaches out like he wants to put his hand on Kirk’s shoulder, but of course he can’t. The wall may be invisible, but it still exists. Nothing can get through it, in either direction. There’s a small airlock in the corner for delivering food, and a bathroom in the other corner; the walls to that are invisible too, for the moment, but when someone wants to use it they become opaque, and the door appears. Quite clever, these isolation cells. Keep all the germs on one side or the other.

“Are you alright, Captain?”

Kirk turns to see Spock’s concerned look.

Yes, they do an excellent job of keeping the germs where they belong. And sometimes they also trap a man inside with another man. 

“Fine, Mr. Spock. Just fine,” Kirk says, his voice infused with false cheerfulness.

The man he’s been in love with for months now.

When he gets tired of pacing, Kirk hops onto his bed, flops onto his back, and stares at the ceiling. There’s a crack about four inches from the wall. It’s about six inches long and is shaped like an elongated letter S.

It’s not actually a crack. He thinks it’s probably a scratch. But he can’t figure out what could scratch the ceiling.

He’s been puzzling it out, off and on, for nearly sixty nine hours now.

Anything, absolutely _anything_ , is better than thinking about the man sitting on the bed next to his.

(This both is and isn’t the honest truth. Thinking about Spock fills him with a lightness, a warmth, he’s never really felt before, and in his clearer moments he knows he’s never experienced anything more lovely. It’s sometimes–quite literally–breathtaking. But it’s also an exquisite kind of torture, being trapped here in this tiny space, wanting to look his fill, wanting to touch, wanting to _kiss_ , but being forced to keep his distance.)

“Why do they make these things so small?” he wonders aloud. “We can barely move in here. It’s a wonder we can even breathe.”

“I assure you there is plenty of oxygen, Captain. All scrubbed and filtered so as to be safe for us to breathe. Although I daresay the more dangerous would be for someone outside to breathe _our_ air.”

“It doesn’t feel like it, Spock. It feels small and crowded and airless.” He risks stealing a glance, then looks fixedly back at the ceiling.

Spock is silent for a moment, as if he’s contemplating something. Then he says, “After Iowa, being anywhere on the ship must feel confining. I’ve never been there, but we have places like that on Vulcan. Wide open plains, big sky. After visiting a place like that, everything feels small. And you lived in Iowa for years.”

Kirk’s heart lifts at the mention of his childhood home. “I fell in love with the stars in Iowa,” he tells Spock. His voice hitches ever so slightly on the word _love_ , but he keeps moving quickly, hoping Spock doesn’t notice. “You’re right about the sky, so big, and it always felt so close, like if you could just get high enough on your tiptoes you’d be able to run your fingers along it and feel something like velvet, only softer.”

He rolls onto his side, angling his body so he can look at Spock now; he feels vulnerable, talking about feelings with the Vulcan, but he’d been the one to bring it up. He goes on. “Most of the time my ship is enough. I’m quite literally among those stars now, Spock, though I still can’t touch them. But I’ve stood on other planets, and I live on a ship that navigates through starlight instead of waves. I just don’t like being trapped, especially when I can’t see outside.”

Spock is silent, contemplating, then says, “Were you ever trapped as a child?”

Kirk can’t stop the slight widening of his eyes, the small jerk of his head. But he manages to keep his voice steady. “Once. I was...small. Maybe five? Six? I don’t remember exactly, it’s…” He takes what he hopes will be a calming breath. “It’s somehow both a muddle and very clear in my mind.”

He’s probably imagining it, but he thinks he sees Spock’s eyes...soften.

“It was summer. We had a lot of storms in summer, thunderstorms rolling across the prairie, loud and fierce. But that summer, that hot July afternoon, the air suddenly stilled. It was eerie; the animals went quiet, even the birds roosting somewhere as if waiting for something to happen. And then the sky turned a sickly green, and we all knew what that meant.” He swallowed reflexively, remembering.

“I believe you call the phenomenon a tornado,” Spock says, his voice gentle.

“Yes,” Kirk says. He’s looking at Spock but he doesn’t see him. He sees a tree against a green sky. He hears Spock’s voice but only just; mostly he hears the rush of wind so relentless it eats houses and pulls one hundred year old trees up by their roots. “We had a shelter, everyone did. There was nothing about the shelter that should have made it any more frightening than any other place we lived, but somehow it was. It was just as brightly lit as my bedroom, but somehow it always seemed more shadowed, like something unfriendly was hiding just beyond my sight. There wasn’t, of course, it was just the fear of the storms that made me feel that way when we went down there, but you can’t make a small child understand a thing like that.”

Spock makes a small noise and Kirk looks up to see an odd look on the other man’s face. “Right,” Kirk says with a crooked smile. “Vulcan logic. I’ll bet you weren’t frightened of anything so mundane as storms when you were a kid.”

Eyebrow raised, Spock says, “On the contrary. I didn’t like storms at all. Or darkness, at least for a little while. But I learned to control my fear, so it couldn’t control me.”

A pang of sadness lances through Kirk’s middle, and at first he doesn’t understand why. Spock had mastered his fears, why should that be sad? And then he slips back into the memory of the tornado, of the stillness and the horrible green sky. He’d been out of his mind with terror; even that young he knew what those things meant. He’d been screaming for his mother, and when he found her he’d been shaking with fear. But she’d wrapped her arms around him, murmured into his hair, and together they’d run to the shelter, hand in hand.

Spock had mastered his fears. But who had been there to hold him, to reassure him, even to hold his hand?

But saying that out loud gets much too close to his own feelings, so he leaves those thoughts behind. “We survived the storm alright; our shelter was good and safe. But when the all clear came through the computer and we tried to get out the door wouldn’t open. The lock was disengaged, the latch opened, but the door wouldn’t move. Not an inch.” His heart races at the memory, the acrid taste of fear rises in his throat. “A tree had been dropped onto our shelter door. Later we realized it wasn’t even our tree–all of the trees on our property were right where they belonged. But tornados don’t care where they drop things, they just pick them up and let them go. It was a big, heavy tree, heavy enough to trap us in our storm shelter.”

Kirk looks back up at the ceiling, at the odd scratch, or crack or whatever, that he’s been staring at for hours on end. “We called for help, but we had food and water and air so we were low priority. It was nearly eight hours later when a rescue crew finally got the tree off our door.” He drapes an arm across his eyes. He’s not sure if he’s hiding or just changing positions. Possibly both. “The shelter seemed to get smaller by the hour. By the minute. By the time they opened the doors it felt about as big as a dollhouse.”

He’s so lost in the memory, so keyed up from being so close to Spock for so long, his body works on autopilot, jumping off the bed and preparing to resume pacing before he’s even conscious of his decision to move. “So that’s the story, Spock. I don’t like to be trapped. I much prefer open spaces, or,” he grins at his own cleverness, “just _space_ , as it were.”

“Captain,” Spock says, reaching out a hand to stop Kirk’s attempt to begin nervously pacing again.

Kirk freezes.

“Jim.” Spock’s hand slides down Kirk’s arm until their fingers are a tangled mess; not perfectly twined together but truly tangled. Kirk lets out a small, breathy “ha!” that breaks enough of the tension that they can pull their hands apart and slip them together again properly.

“Jim,” Spock says again, his voice soothing and calm. “We only have a few hours left, as long as we don’t start to show symptoms. The chamber is not getting any smaller. You are going to be okay.”

Kirk hears the words, but from very far away. Instead he’s keenly aware of Spock’s palm against his, the way their fingers twine together, the tug on his arm. He follows the pull, let’s Spock guide him to sit on the bed beside him.

“Spock,” he says. He wants to say something else. _Anything_ else. He’s usually so good at this, all smooth edges and easy words.

“Just relax, Jim. You don’t have to say anything. You don’t always have to fill every silence with explanations. Sometimes the silence is enough.”

Kirk tears his eyes away from their clasped hands so he can look into Spock’s eyes. With his eyes he asks, _Really?_

Spock doesn’t answer, not with words. But he squeezes Kirk’s hand. The corner of his mouth lifts in an almost smile. He leans forward, eyes still locked with Kirk’s, until their foreheads are just touching.

Oh.

“Spock?” He’s repeating himself, but Spock just finished saying he doesn’t need to overspeak.

Still, he has to know.

Spock squeezes his hand again. “Yes,” he says. No hesitation, no uncertainty. Something loosens in Kirk’s chest.

“Scan’s are all clear, you can get back to captaining your ship, Jim,” McCoy says, strolling into the ‘safe’ part of the isolation room, tapping at his PADD as he walks. Under his breath he adds, “Whatever those _captaining_ duties actually are.”

“Shhh.”

He looks up, startled by the sound, and is even more startled by what he sees.

Spock’s bed is canted up so he’s almost sitting, a pillow behind his head. And sound asleep, the side of his face pressed against Spock’s chest and his limbs tangled around the Vulcan, is Jim Kirk.

“He’s asleep,” Spock says, rather unnecessarily, his voice pitched low so as not to wake his sleeping captain. “He’s been rather...distressed.”

“Finally opened up to you, did he?” McCoy asks with a grin.

Spock looks down at Jim, and McCoy sees a warmth he rarely sees come over the man’s face. “Indeed,” he says.

“Good,” he says with a nod. “I’ll be off then. Your walls are gone, by the way. You’re free to go whenever he wakes up. You could just carry him back to your quarters now, if you’ve got the notion…” He winks.

Not looking up from Jim, Spock says, “Thank you, Doctor, but no. I think I’ll just let him sleep.”

“Suit yourself,” McCoy says, amusement in his voice.

When he takes one last look over his shoulder, Spock is gently running fingers through Jim’s hair.

“Wonders never cease,” he mutters to himself once he’s in the corridor. “All it took was a little accidental exposure and mandatory quarantine. They’ll be telling this story for years.” Shaking his head, he grumbles, “Of course, they’ll forget it was me who stuck them in the same isolation chamber.”

 _Even though half the others were empty,_ he thinks with a grin. He congratulates himself for a job well done.

**Author's Note:**

> Bones didn't actually *lie* to Kirk. He never said the other isolation cells were full, just that they weren't available. ;)


End file.
